Madame Tussads & Empire State Building - May 2 '08

It was around 2am on May 1 when we started sleeping.Gopal and Raj started scanning through the TV Channels. Raj (Rajender Gurram) is my team mate and a very good friend of me. He cannot live without two things. One is very good spicy andhra food & the second one is movies. I asked them to switch off the TV.mmm..No Chance....I was very tired & started sleeping placing an alarm at 8:00am.

We got ready on time and the hotel graciously dropped us in the Jamaica metro railway station. These hotels have good habit of providing complimentary pick up and drop to nearest railway station & airports. We got the tickets to Penn Station(34th Street). It was a 25 min travel from Jamaica to Penn Station.

Times Square listed in the top of our plan for the day. Geetha and Gopal are the navigators of the tour. They both had a map in the hand and plan in the mind. We just followed them. Geetha has been to Newyork already a year back and she knows quite lot of places there. That helped us a lot. She got her parents to US recently & care on her parents throughout the tour is phenomenal.

In the mean time - we reached Penn Station & took a subway train and got down at 42nd street to see Times square. Its not only that Newyork was busy. The underworld of Newyork was also busy. As we reached Times Square - our hands became reflexive to our vision & the cameras started twinkling. These guys told that we were going to Madame Tussads. I didnot know what it is. I was busy listening the busy of Newyork.

We entered into a building. There were two rows of queue standing and there was a stair case nearest to the entrance. It resembled some textile shop in chennai. We already bought the Newyork city pass so we didnot stand on the line. We got our tickets showing the pass and walked in.

As i walked in, I saw Morgan Freeman standing.....I walked towards him. But he did not move. Then i observed its made of wax. I remembered seeing my friends posing with Diana, Angelina jolie in orkut. Oh...this is the place they took all those photographs..Its the wax museum of Newyork. It had almost all the celebrities of the world and the only Indian was M.K.Gandhi. Then what else to say. The musuem would never need any lightings as the cameras flickered more than 60 times per second. We started taking orkut snaps but did not end until after 3 hours.

There were lot of photos that were taken in the museum. The photo that i love was the one i took with Morgan Freeman. Cos of the excellent role he played in Shawshank redemption. I would say I liked him in the movie than Tim Robbins.When you like somebody you ll like all the things associated with them & no matter what it is. mmm..Yeah..I love that photo.

It was around 3:30 we came out of Madame Tussads. We all were very hungry. The plan was to go to "Saravana Bhavan" for lunch. We caught a subway train and arrived at a station. I dont remember the what the station was. Later we came to know that it was a wrong station to go to Saravana Bhavan but the right station to go Central Park.

We got two taxis to go to Saravana Bhavan. The address we had was 102 lexington. Gopal,Geetha's Mom, Geetha's Dad were in one taxi and me,raj, geetha were in the other one. Gopal's taxi took them to Saravana Bhavan. The taxi we took drove us to 102nd street lexington. As we reached there we saw there was no saravana bhavan. Oops...!! we were screwed for the second time but this time not by the sardar.

We called Gops and he told that they are in Saravana Bhavan and it is in 26th Street. Wow..We travelled from 102nd Street to 26th Street, Lexington. It took around 40 mins to reach there. The traffic was less but the signals were more. One thing i understood during the drive was NY is horizontally divided into streets and vertically into avenues. It was a costly understanding ofcourse as we paid 25 bugs more to beat this bush driving around.

After the lunch the next place of visit in our list was Brooklyn Bridge. 28th Street & 23rd street are the subway stations which are near to Hotel Saravana Bhavan. We walked to 28th Street and catched a subway train to Brooklyn Bridge.

It was around 6:30pm we reached the station. You need walk a while to reach the bridge from the station. The breeze was cold & little heavy as we climbed over the bridge and it whispered that we are little late to see the bridge. There was an american joking on the road in that chill weather. Gopal & Me faced towards each other and uttered "Ooty kuluru la anchu manikku joking thevayada....??"

As we climbed we saw her. I remembered i have seen her picture somewhere. How can I forgot? she is the one who posed on the wrapper of my nightmare subject's Textbook - Engineering Mechanics by Beer & Johnson. I am so fortunate to clear that subject.

She was 3/4 mile in length & she stood across the hudson river. She connected the brooklyn & Manhattan of Newyork. Steel wires woven on the top suspended her potraying the art of civil engineering. It was absolutely chill and windy and we prepared to leave.

Our next plan was to visit Empire State Building - The world tallest building as WTC is destructed. We reached there around 9:30pm. The reception welcomed us stating that it is obsolutely misty and it was a zero visiblity day. Empire State building has 102 floors. They will take you to 102nd floor and you can have an excellent view of Newyork. As i told - it was a zero visibility day. So like attending classes in the college for attendance - we went to 86th floor and 102nd floor. But could not see anything except the cloud/fog around us.